The Khyber Pass: A History of Empire and Invasion
By Paddy Docherty
Faber £17.99, 288 pages
FT bookshop price: £14.39

The Khyber Pass is the harshest of landscapes: barren and dry, drained of colour, warmth and softness. The mountainsides are grey and sheer, covered with sharp mica schist, the hardness relieved only at the valley bottoms with windbreaks of poplar and ashok. There is no snow here - it is too dry - but the icy winds from the snow peaks sweep down the scarred valley sides. The sky is grey and the air is grey and the greyness seeps into the ground and the stones and the buildings. The only colours are the red and yellow silk flags flying over the new graves in the graveyards.

Today, the pass is a stronghold of Pakistani drug barons whose luxuriously appointed fortresses dot the roadsides at every turn. Nearby lies the arms bazaar that has equipped the various jihadi outfits who lurk in hills and caves between Pakistan and Afghanistan. Here, stacked mortar shells and anti-tank ammunition are available over the counter, for cash, as if they were tins of baked beans.

For millennia, as Paddy Docherty shows in his new book The Khyber Pass, armies equipped with the latest weaponry have been crashing through this narrow valley on their way to attempt the conquest of India; and for as long as history records, the pass has been the scene of ambushes, battles and massacres. Persians, Scythians, Kushans, Huns, Turks and Mughals have all debouched through here, most of them sooner or later coming to grief in a similar manner to the last of the foreign invaders to take the Khyber, the British. As Kipling put it: “A scrimmage in a Border Station/ A canter down some dark defile/ Two thousand pounds of education/ Drops dead to a ten-rupee jezail/ The Crammer’s boast, the Squadron’s pride,/ Shot like a rabbit in a ride… ”

On a visit to the region some years ago, Docherty realised the “concentration of incident and activity that had passed through this slim mountain defile over the years”. After all, “alongside the straits of Gibraltar and the Suez Canal” the Khyber was “one of the strategic keys that locked up the world before the age of flight”. In celebration of this, he has written an account of the pass that is in effect a potted history of 3,000 years of central Asian history. The result is no work of great scholarship, but is certainly an energetic and readable introduction to the succession of armies and warlords, emperors and dynasties who passed through the Khyber from Darius to Osama bin Laden.

The book works best when Docherty is exploring some of the less well-known chapters in central Asian history. There are better places perhaps to learn about the vicinity of the Khyber during the Mughal or British periods, but Docherty gives good accounts of less documented dynasties such as the Parthians and the Kushans. He is especially interesting when he touches on some of the archaeological discoveries that have been made in recent years.

I had no idea, for example, about the recent rediscovery of the Scythian treasure, long believed lost in the Taliban’s wrecking of the Kabul Museum. Yet in 2003 the contents of a succession of Scythian royal graves - gold bracelets, earrings of lapis lazuli, a crown of five filigree arches cut from sheet gold - turned up in a vault in the Central Bank of Kabul. There it had been hidden by brave museum staff who, even under torture, had refused to reveal the hoard’s whereabouts to the same iconoclasts who dynamited the Bamiyan Buddhas. Nor did I know about the birch-bark Buddhist texts recently acquired by the British Library that apparently reveal the existence of a previously unknown independent Gandharan Buddhist tradition, deriving from about AD100.

The book has flaws: there is too little focus, and far too often leaves the Khyber to range wildly through the history of Asia: between pages 115 and 126, for example, Docherty leads us on a wild chase through the rise of Islam and a brief history of the Umayyad and Abbasid dynasties, dropping in briefly at the courts of various Huns and Avars before coming to rest at the Seljuk Turks and Samanids. Only twice in this dash do we come even within a few hundred miles of Khyber.

Nevertheless, what Docherty does do very well is remind us that globalisation is not a recent phenomenon. “Before the advent of Islam and even before the birth of Christ,” he writes in his epilogue, “the Khyber Pass provided a conduit for a passage of ideas and influences that we might recognise today as globalisation… The global exercise of power is no more a feature of the 21st century than of earlier times.”

William Dalrymple’s “The Last Moghul” won the 2007 Duff Cooper Prize for History.